Anyone....

[afwasborstel]

Has anyone some experience with Avid DV Express capturing editing and exporting? What is the best format to export for making SVCD?? All I get sofar is some crappy movies...

Please...please...
Somebody HELP me...

[Chips144]

I can't speak for the AVID DV Express, but I have a Sony Vaio computer which includes Sony's own (as far as I can tell) video capture card. The capture is done in a format that is not applicable to any other software. The idea is to capture then export the captured video in a format that is usable. I can capture in low quality, standard quality and high quality, where quality is measured in bit rate. I can export to MPEG1, MPEG2 and AVI.

Here is what I have found after much experimenting. Regardless of the source (analog sources only, of course) the best result are obtained by capturing at high quality, then export to avi, then transcode with TMPGEnc to SVCD format. It turns out that TMPGEnc does a much better job coding to MPEG1 and MPEG2 than does the native encoders included in the Sony software. Exporting to avi preserves as much of the original information as possible.

Contrary to what I have read in several posts here which imply that high quality capturing of low quality source material is a waste of time, I have found that attempting to match the capture quality to the source quality is a waste of time. What I mean by that is the capture quality is measured in how many bits per second are being coded from analog to digital. Source quality is a qualitive judgement as far as I am concerned. You may have an old home movie recorded in VHS 6 hour mode (probably lousey quality) or you may have a very high quality clip from a satellite download. The bottom line is I always capture at the highest rate that my card will allow regardless of source. Sure, this will generate a much larger file, but after all the processing, those files are deleted and I am left with a cd-r burned SVCD of very good quality (in this case quality is defined by my "eye").

Maybe you can apply this to your problem.

[afwasborstel]

Thnx Chips..

I guess you are right. Avid has it's own fileformat. Brings me to some other questions. In what format do people write their captured movies away. Use they the Codec's from Microsoft, or Divx Codecs?? And if you convert them with Tmpgenc what kind of settings do they use. I can never get the quality of an everage divx ripped from a dvd.

I know untill now my movies I made with my cam suck bigtime(to much light..defocus, the usual beginners luck). But when I convert them with a Divx codec or apple(quicktime) the are not the same as the original. Much more blocks etc.

Does anyone know btw what teh DV file format is?? I should guess it would be the same format that is written on a DV-tape...but when I convert that format with Tmpgenc it looks like shit(also with CCE btw).

Maybe this is not the right forum for these kind of questions. But If somebody can help me more...PLEASE..


Btw. Baldrick how about renaming this site to www.vcdHELL.com

[Chips144]

The first thing to remember is that if you rip a dvd and then convert it to DIVX or SVCD you will invariably get a better result than if you are trying to convert home movies to either format. The reason for this is the quality of the source material. In most cases, but not all, the dvd was created with the best equipment that is available to the movie studios (BIG BUCKS). Camcorders for home use can't come close to the capture quality and reasonably priced encoders or transcoders can't come close to the quality of the ones used by the studios. So your home movies will never look like "Hollywood rendered" epics.

So you do the best you can. In my case, I am using a Sony analog camcorder ($1700 just 3 years ago). I am probably going to upgrade this in the near future. PC Magizine lists the new Sony DCR-VX2000 as the highest rated. However, it costs approximately $3000. This camcorder has three separate capture arrays, one for each color and outputs digital (not quite sure what format). In any case, with the camcorder I have now, I shoot my video, then capture it with my capture card in highest quality mode. I then export the captured video as an avi file. I process that file in TMPGEnc. I created my own template, but essentially it is the NTSC template (interlaced), NOT THE NTSC Film TEMPLATE, set for SVCD bit rate. Also, since I want the resultant disk to play on my TV and not my computer, I DO NOT use Inverse Telecine. The results that I get are an SVCD that looks as good as the original tape from the camcorder.